Although I didn’t actually figure out the pattern until a couple of years ago, being in the physical presence of other human beings makes some of my orthogonal skills evaporate or sharply deteriorate. This is most notable with spatial organization skills (you would not believe how much stuff I can pack away into limited space… when no one is watching...) but applies to many other things, too.
I can accomplish a great many things, especially unfamiliar things, only when there is no help available. To the point where there was a period in my teens where I was new to cooking, and could only cook if my mother was not home, because if she was home, I would find the need to run to her 15 times asking where stuff was, how stuff worked, why the recipe said X, etc. Sometimes she became too fed up with me to answer the questions, or wouldn’t know the answers, or would be too busy to engage with me at all, and this would render me completely helpless to do anything but turn all the heat sources off and flee. If she was not home, it never occurred to me to give up and wait for her return before proceeding with my task, and I’d look a little harder, scrutinze the appliance menus a little longer, apply my knowledge of how food interacts a little more diligently—and would produce perfectly fine food. I will also not learn routes around a neighborhood unless I walk them by myself—I can walk the same route with company a hundred times and then have no idea where the hell I am if I go alone the hundred and first.
My poorly-founded speculation: Girls may be more likely to try to solve problems with help from fellow humans. This help is unlikely to be available in a controlled study. (It’s also frowned upon or unavailable in a number of academic or professional contexts.) Controlled studies are, however, likely to have humans present, blocking the bits that step up and say “okay, I’m doing this by myself now”.
My poorly-founded speculation: Girls may be more likely to try to solve problems with help from fellow humans. This help is unlikely to be available in a controlled study. (It’s also frowned upon or unavailable in a number of academic or professional contexts.) Controlled studies are, however, likely to have humans present, blocking the bits that step up and say “okay, I’m doing this by myself now”.
That’s a curious hypothesis. The corollary of the “males are incapable of asking for directions” stereotype could be the stereotype “females are incapable of navigating without asking for directions”.
Unfortunately, I can only offer evidence of the “non-ravens are non-black” variety, but that could still be useful.
My experience as a cis male: I have found that at my programming job, where many things are rather unfamiliar, I will spend about 15-60 minutes looking something up rather than ask someone for an answer (which will take about 1 minute). I have also done the directions thing (“We don’t need to ask, I’ll figure it out!”). I believe my internal motivation is I think I will learn it more strongly / discover other interesting things if I look it up myself, and I perceive some small status loss in looking for help / I don’t like bothering other people.
[edit] Something else I should add- I don’t appear to have a strong fear of failing. I will blurt out objections in class, and be right more than I’m wrong, but I can shrug off being wrong. It seems likely that this is linked to emotional and reputational security. (There’s also significant research showing that men are more likely to guess if they don’t know something than just respond that they don’t know it, whereas women are more likely to take the opposite approach.)
Right- that’s part of my desire to not bother people. But oftentimes at least one person who could help will be already bothered, and so that’s not actually a cost (but I act like it is).
...being in the physical presence of other human beings makes some of my orthogonal skills evaporate or sharply deteriorate.
I experience this, especially with parents. Their mere presence makes me less communicative and attentive as well. Might it be considered (or already exist as) a bias worth investigating and canonizing?
Sounds like a learned behavioral model—just about everyone acts differently around their parents than their peers. That’s only to be expected, since your peers will expect you to behave differently towards them than to your parents. So we learn to behave differently around them, which may also involve deeper effects like different ways of thinking around them.
Did your parents (implicitly or explicitly) discourage communicative and attentive behavior when you were growing up?
I haven’t heard of anyone else with the pattern you had for cooking, but I’ve heard more than one person say that they can’t learn routes unless they’re in charge of navigating. IIRC, one of them was a man who was the best navigator (serious about using maps, excellent long term memory for how to get to places he’d only gone to once) I’ve known.
For me it’s not so much “there is no help available” that spurs me to try things as “no one will ever know if I fail”. If I think I may break something by trying it, I’m much more likely to ask for help. If someone knows I am trying something, it will be embarrassing to fail. Even worse if someone will not only know, but be annoyed that I’ve bungled it when they have to fix it!
I’m also hesitant to speak up unless I’m sure of what I’m saying (because how dare I take up others’ time by being wrong?), which means people who are quick to blurt out their ideas without double- and triple-checking are faster to respond—so I’m only heard when I have something to say that I’m confident of and that no one else has yet thought of. It’s a little bit dispiriting to have the same knowledge as others and never get to show evidence of it.
I don’t enjoy asking for help—I’d rather figure things out myself—but I hate being recognized for screwing something up more.
I find attention very helpful in cases where the limiting factor is not my ability, but my akrasia. I need to feel like my audience would jump on me if I didn’t update a chapter of my fiction when I said I would; in school, I needed to expect my teachers to notice and care if I didn’t show up to class (this meant I got very little academic value out of my semester abroad, since they didn’t, so I didn’t); etc. But when I don’t know quite what I’m doing in some minor-but-essential way, having help handy ensures that I will not learn to do it.
I’ve noticed a sort of similar effect with old-fashioned adventure games (the kind that LucasArts and Sierra used to make). The existence of the Internet and GameFAQs has effectively ruined that genre for me. Part of the fun was spending hours on end frustrated when you couldn’t solve a certain puzzle, only to finally come up with the solution and get a major feeling of accomplishment. These days it’s far too easy to search the web for a solution whenever one starts feeling in the least bit frustrated. (And then when you have the walkthrough open, look up the solutions for the rest of the puzzles as well...)
I’ve also noticed that if I’m solving math problems and a complete model solution exists, I’m far more likely to give up early and look up the right way of doing it. If there were no such solution available, I might work on it far longer and eventually solve it myself.
A somewhat promising approach I’ve been experimenting on is to tell myself that no matter what, I need to work on this set of math problems for at least (say) an hour. That reduces the incentive to cheat, since I know that it won’t save me any time. The hard part is in actually sticking to this.
I’ve noticed this as well, although it doesn’t seem to apply in all cases. Here’s a guess about the distinction between cases:
When the puzzle seems like an obstacle to achieving the goal, I’m more likely to attempt to look up the solution. This is the case for many adventure/RPG games, where I’m mainly interested in advancing within the game, and also for the average homework assignment, where I mainly want the good grade.
When solving the puzzle is an end in itself, I’m more likely to try to keep going by myself. This is the case for games like Portal, where the puzzle is the point and is fairly fun, and also for homework or research in a topic I enjoy.
Although I didn’t actually figure out the pattern until a couple of years ago, being in the physical presence of other human beings makes some of my orthogonal skills evaporate or sharply deteriorate. This is most notable with spatial organization skills (you would not believe how much stuff I can pack away into limited space… when no one is watching...) but applies to many other things, too.
I can accomplish a great many things, especially unfamiliar things, only when there is no help available. To the point where there was a period in my teens where I was new to cooking, and could only cook if my mother was not home, because if she was home, I would find the need to run to her 15 times asking where stuff was, how stuff worked, why the recipe said X, etc. Sometimes she became too fed up with me to answer the questions, or wouldn’t know the answers, or would be too busy to engage with me at all, and this would render me completely helpless to do anything but turn all the heat sources off and flee. If she was not home, it never occurred to me to give up and wait for her return before proceeding with my task, and I’d look a little harder, scrutinze the appliance menus a little longer, apply my knowledge of how food interacts a little more diligently—and would produce perfectly fine food. I will also not learn routes around a neighborhood unless I walk them by myself—I can walk the same route with company a hundred times and then have no idea where the hell I am if I go alone the hundred and first.
My poorly-founded speculation: Girls may be more likely to try to solve problems with help from fellow humans. This help is unlikely to be available in a controlled study. (It’s also frowned upon or unavailable in a number of academic or professional contexts.) Controlled studies are, however, likely to have humans present, blocking the bits that step up and say “okay, I’m doing this by myself now”.
That’s a curious hypothesis. The corollary of the “males are incapable of asking for directions” stereotype could be the stereotype “females are incapable of navigating without asking for directions”.
Unfortunately, I can only offer evidence of the “non-ravens are non-black” variety, but that could still be useful.
My experience as a cis male: I have found that at my programming job, where many things are rather unfamiliar, I will spend about 15-60 minutes looking something up rather than ask someone for an answer (which will take about 1 minute). I have also done the directions thing (“We don’t need to ask, I’ll figure it out!”). I believe my internal motivation is I think I will learn it more strongly / discover other interesting things if I look it up myself, and I perceive some small status loss in looking for help / I don’t like bothering other people.
[edit] Something else I should add- I don’t appear to have a strong fear of failing. I will blurt out objections in class, and be right more than I’m wrong, but I can shrug off being wrong. It seems likely that this is linked to emotional and reputational security. (There’s also significant research showing that men are more likely to guess if they don’t know something than just respond that they don’t know it, whereas women are more likely to take the opposite approach.)
Which will take one minute, but has a high chance of knocking them out of the “zone”, and regaining focus can easily take 15-20 minutes...
Right- that’s part of my desire to not bother people. But oftentimes at least one person who could help will be already bothered, and so that’s not actually a cost (but I act like it is).
I experience this, especially with parents. Their mere presence makes me less communicative and attentive as well. Might it be considered (or already exist as) a bias worth investigating and canonizing?
Sounds like a learned behavioral model—just about everyone acts differently around their parents than their peers. That’s only to be expected, since your peers will expect you to behave differently towards them than to your parents. So we learn to behave differently around them, which may also involve deeper effects like different ways of thinking around them.
Did your parents (implicitly or explicitly) discourage communicative and attentive behavior when you were growing up?
I don’t think it’s a bias. It’s not about reasoning. But it’s an interesting performance-inhibiting factor.
I haven’t heard of anyone else with the pattern you had for cooking, but I’ve heard more than one person say that they can’t learn routes unless they’re in charge of navigating. IIRC, one of them was a man who was the best navigator (serious about using maps, excellent long term memory for how to get to places he’d only gone to once) I’ve known.
.
For me it’s not so much “there is no help available” that spurs me to try things as “no one will ever know if I fail”. If I think I may break something by trying it, I’m much more likely to ask for help. If someone knows I am trying something, it will be embarrassing to fail. Even worse if someone will not only know, but be annoyed that I’ve bungled it when they have to fix it!
I’m also hesitant to speak up unless I’m sure of what I’m saying (because how dare I take up others’ time by being wrong?), which means people who are quick to blurt out their ideas without double- and triple-checking are faster to respond—so I’m only heard when I have something to say that I’m confident of and that no one else has yet thought of. It’s a little bit dispiriting to have the same knowledge as others and never get to show evidence of it.
I don’t enjoy asking for help—I’d rather figure things out myself—but I hate being recognized for screwing something up more.
I find attention very helpful in cases where the limiting factor is not my ability, but my akrasia. I need to feel like my audience would jump on me if I didn’t update a chapter of my fiction when I said I would; in school, I needed to expect my teachers to notice and care if I didn’t show up to class (this meant I got very little academic value out of my semester abroad, since they didn’t, so I didn’t); etc. But when I don’t know quite what I’m doing in some minor-but-essential way, having help handy ensures that I will not learn to do it.
This sounds like my experience, at least some of the time. I am male, for what it’s worth.
I’ve noticed a sort of similar effect with old-fashioned adventure games (the kind that LucasArts and Sierra used to make). The existence of the Internet and GameFAQs has effectively ruined that genre for me. Part of the fun was spending hours on end frustrated when you couldn’t solve a certain puzzle, only to finally come up with the solution and get a major feeling of accomplishment. These days it’s far too easy to search the web for a solution whenever one starts feeling in the least bit frustrated. (And then when you have the walkthrough open, look up the solutions for the rest of the puzzles as well...)
I’ve also noticed that if I’m solving math problems and a complete model solution exists, I’m far more likely to give up early and look up the right way of doing it. If there were no such solution available, I might work on it far longer and eventually solve it myself.
A somewhat promising approach I’ve been experimenting on is to tell myself that no matter what, I need to work on this set of math problems for at least (say) an hour. That reduces the incentive to cheat, since I know that it won’t save me any time. The hard part is in actually sticking to this.
I’ve noticed this as well, although it doesn’t seem to apply in all cases. Here’s a guess about the distinction between cases:
When the puzzle seems like an obstacle to achieving the goal, I’m more likely to attempt to look up the solution. This is the case for many adventure/RPG games, where I’m mainly interested in advancing within the game, and also for the average homework assignment, where I mainly want the good grade.
When solving the puzzle is an end in itself, I’m more likely to try to keep going by myself. This is the case for games like Portal, where the puzzle is the point and is fairly fun, and also for homework or research in a topic I enjoy.
Although I have no idea how representative I am, I’ll add that as a male, I suffer the same issues.
.